"We’ve got some exciting news for this fall: our first Blu-ray discs are coming! We’ve picked a little over a dozen titles from the collection for Blu-ray treatment, and we’ll begin rolling them out in October. These new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions."

The announcement says that the first twelve titles to be released will be:

I kind of feel sorry for Criterion in one regard: They started out doing laserdiscs, then with the advent of DVDs, they got pushed back nearly to square one of their production process. I say "nearly" because, while they did have to remaster everything, they didn't have to do new transfers, since the resolution of LDs and DVDs are the same. [1]

Now it seems like Blu-ray will require them to go all the way back to square one and do new hi-def transfers of movies they've already released before (and released twice or more times in many instances -- they've already done at least two DVDs of Cocteau's "La Belle et la Bête").

On the other hand, I don't feel sorry about the fact that they'll make a freakin' fortune from selling Blu-ray DVDs.

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[1] Long ago, I did a side-by-side comparison of the laserdisc and DVD of "The Red Shoes," and noticed that they appeared to be from the same source transfer. Both editions had identical flaws -- scratches, color instabilities, etc.